Saturday, August 08, 2009

Cargo Cult Science and Doings at Useless Ranch

One of this blogs readers, who lives on a Florida ranch with her physicist husband has an interesting blog of her own, Doings at Useless Ranch. In particular a post from last February Equine Cargo Cult describes a horse and donkey dynamic relationship where the horses end up acting quite like a cargo cult for the Donkeys. They lick the lock to their food that was once opened by a donkey's prehensile lip. That was just a tiny summary, but you should really take a look at the well written post here to get the full story.

Now I can't mention this with out talking about the great Cargo Cult Science essay by Richard Feynman. From wikipedia quoting Feynman, "it has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing 'a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty."

The first google hit gives a strange 404 error so I'll include the full text below. I recommend reading it if you ever happen to plan on contributing to science. I apologize for its length, but I guarantee it is quality.

2 comments:

Speaking of Feynman, Microsoft has purchased the rights to some of his lectures and is streaming them for free on their website.

The good part of this is that you can watch Feynman's lectures right from your home computer. The bad part is that this is Microsoft we are talking about, and I for one have never gotten the website to work.

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The Lansey Brothers' Blog is a joint project between the Three Lansey Brothers: Eli, Jonathan (Yoni) and Aryeh (in age [not height] order).
Three posts per week. One brother per post. Results not guaranteed.
Be sure to check out The Unofficial Official Intro Post